The Greenstone Building, officially the Greenstone Government of Canada Building, and sometimes known as the Greenstone Government Building, is located on Franklin (50th) Avenue in downtown Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada. It is a four-storey building faced in stone, completed and opened in 2005. Within are the local offices of 16 federal government agencies. Prior to the building's construction they were scattered in different buildings around the city.
The name comes from greenstone, a rock found in great quantity in the area, from which the gold that led to Yellowknife's development was extracted. The building reflects that past in two other ways. Its interior stair tower is sided in slanted boards that recall the mineshaft towers still standing, and the location of a prominent local fault beneath the building is marked on the lobby floor.
It was designed by the Edmonton firm of Manasc Isaac to be environmentally sustainable. Its central atrium has a curtain wall with photovoltaic cells, the largest such structure in Canada, and the second largest worldwide, at the time of the building's completion. Five percent of the building's electricity comes from that wall; it is used to heat water, some of which comes from the building's green roof and local groundwater, resulting in the building using half as much water as a comparably sized building. Heating efficiency is such that the building remains adequately warm during subzero winter days when many adjacent offices have to close. The building's green design reportedly saves CDN$80,000 in energy costs and reduces greenhouse gas emissions by each year.
Two years after its completion, on time and under budget, the Greenstone Building was recognized with LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Gold certification by the Canada Green Building Council. It was the first building in Northern Canada to achieve that designation, and the first LEED Gold for the architects. In 2007 the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada further honored it with an Innovation in Architecture Award of Excellence.
Building The Greenstone Building is located in the area of downtown Yellowknife referred to locally as New Town. It is on the east side of 50th Avenue, often called Franklin Avenue, a southwest–northeast thoroughfare, four lanes wide at that point, which is Yellowknife's main street. It occupies the western end of a rectangular block between 51st and 52nd streets on the north and south; 52nd Avenue is the next street to the east. The terrain is generally level, around in elevation, sloping very gently down to Yellowknife Bay of Great Slave Lake 800 m (a half-mile) to the east and remaining level to Frame Lake approximately 400 m (a quarter-mile) to the west.
The surrounding neighbourhood is urban. Modernist high-rise office buildings dominate this stretch of Franklin. Three of them—the Northwest Tower to the immediate south of the Greenstone Building and the Scotia Center and Precambrian Building across the street—are among the city's tallest. The Bellanca Building, once the tallest, and the Centre Square Mall tower, the current champion, are within blocks. In between them the lots have single- or two-storey buildings with space for commercial use at the street level. Behind them are parking lots.
A block to the southwest is the Yellowknife campus of Aurora College and, across Franklin, the main offices of the city school district, one of its elementary schools and the log cabin schoolhouse that was the first school building in the city. A block to the west the urban development gives way to open space in the form of a park along the lake shore next to City Hall. On the north development continues for many blocks before an area of taiga and exposed Canadian Shield bedrock buffers the descent to Old Town, the original city, on a peninsula extending into the bay. East of the building, the city likewise occupies most of the space until it gives way to residential property and open space at the bay shore.
Exterior
The building itself is composed of two sections, both four storeys in height with a flat roof, topped by a small flat-roofed structure that houses the upper end of the elevator shafts, with gardens taking up most of the space on the roofs. They are joined at the northwest corner of the lot, the southeast corner of the 51st Street intersection. It uses reinforced concrete flat slabs as its structural system. Paralleling 51st is a basically rectangular section five bays wide by 17 long. It is rounded at the corner with Franklin, allowing 10 bays on that end. The main entrance portico curves between the two sections at ground level. Joined to that block on the west is an irregularly shaped 14-bay section whose west side begins to curve south halfway towards that end of the property.See accompanying photo
Sidewalks surround the building on three sides. In front of the longer of the two sections, along Franklin, is a planted bed with concrete walls and wooden benches. It has shrubs and some small deciduous trees that have grown to the height of the second story. A gravel path runs between them and the front of the building. Along 51st, planters set in the sidewalk hold more shrubs and trees along the entire length of the wing. Use of the Street View option from this link will allow a view of the building's rear. A similar area planted with shrubs and flowers runs along the east facade. To the east, in the rear, is a small park with benches, grass, and more deciduous trees buffered by a concrete walkway. Beyond the park is the building's parking lot. Per Street View from this location.
On the rear is a curved curtain wall between two engaged flat-roofed stair towers, connecting the far corners of both sections. It is made of glass with photovoltaic cells inside. A small secondary entrance portico is located in the center. At the building's southeast corner is an emergency exit.
The north and east facades, facing the street, have a similar treatment. The first storey is faced in rusticated stone set in mortar. All bays are set with double-pane vertical casement windows on the curved sections and large four-pane casement on the straight sections, recessed with plain red sills and lintels.
A similar red stringcourse above the windows separates the stone facing from smooth light tan stucco. It in turn is separated by another red stringcourse from a section with light brown panels and the same window treatments as the first storey. The course doubles as the sill line for the windows; another one serves as their lintels and marks off a division the same as the one below. The third storey has the same treatment. At the roofline, above another layer of tan panels, there is a plain red cornice, echoed on the top of the elevator-shaft building.
Both stair towers are faced entirely in the rusticated stone. Each has a single narrow double-pane casement window on each storey, facing south. A single narrow concrete course runs above the first and fourth storeys. The towers have the same red cornice at the roofline.
The eastern face of the north wing has a metallic framework of curved metal bars holding sections of stationary louvers. It covers all bays on the upper storeys. There are no windows on the ground level of this face.
A flat semicircular roof covers the main entrance portico on Franklin. Its wide overhanging eave, with another red cornice at the roofline, is supported by several dual steel flat-plate brackets extending to the ground. The entrance doors are aluminum and glass, set in a wall of square glass panels. The rear entrance is a smaller portico faced in rusticated stone with a red cornice, flat roof, and single door in a similar glass treatment with light fixtures flanking its upper corners.
Interior The inside of the building is dominated by a full-height atrium, illuminated mostly by natural light coming in through the curtain wall on the south. A thick black line on the floor marks the location of the West Bay Fault beneath. All the offices within, mostly open space separated into cubicles, are located on the north, with windows looking out over the atrium and through the curtain wall. An open slanted wooden spiral staircase, echoing the many mineshaft towers in the Yellowknife area, complements the elevators in providing access. Its railing is the same red found on the exterior of the trim. On the upper storeys the space below the office windows is faced in spaced wooden flushboard similar to that used on the staircase, with random boards painted red as well.
History While the site on which Yellowknife now sits was long known to the Dene whose copper knives later gave it its name, and had been visited by European explorers in the late 18th century, it did not attract any settlement until gold was found in the greenstone belts of the Canadian Shield underlying the area. By 1936 it was a mining boomtown, and most of today's Old Town was built on the bay. Canada's entry into World War II three years later put that on hold, but after the war mining and development resumed.
1953–2001: Early federal presence in Yellowknife After the war the federal government, which administered the Northwest Territories directly, realized the community needed space to grow and established New Town further inland, building the city's post office there. In 1953 it allowed limited local government, and 14 years later Yellowknife was formally named the territorial capital.At the time that included what is now the separate territory of Nunavut. This led to an influx of government workers and another economic boom.
For much of that time the heavy federal government presence in the growing city was housed wherever space could be found. A small group of houses on Glen Street, or 51st Street just north of the Greenstone Building, was known as "Government Row". One two-storey gabled wooden house was known as the Federal Building. After the 1970s it was used by the Tree of Peace organization as the Native Friendship Center.
2001–2004: Design and construction By the end of the 20th century the gold boom had died down and most mines had closed, although diamond mines had begun to replace them. With vacant properties all over Yellowknife, the federal government decided it was time to build a central headquarters for the many agencies that had been scattered across downtown for decades. At the end of 2001, it bought the property on Franklin between 51st and 52nd for just under CDN$2 million, then occupied by a building that had during the boom years housed Hudson's Bay and Canadian Tire retail stores.
Demolition was completed the next summer. In September, Public Works and Government Services Canada, the government's procurement agency, commissioned Edmonton architects Manasc Isaac, specialists in sustainable buildings, to design a building expected to last 75 years on the site, flexible enough to accommodate different uses should that change be necessary, with the goal of receiving silver Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification from the Canada Green Building Council. Progress toward that goal started even before the new building's design was complete, with 90% of the material from the demolished Canadian Tire building recycled or otherwise diverted from landfill. During the actual construction, recycled and recyclable materials were used wherever possible; site fences were installed to control erosion that might be caused.